Over the years, this has become one of my most trusted and valuable tools. And to have the opportunity to make it a little better — and leave my mark — puts a big, old stupid grin on my face.

These are the three areas I will be focusing on:

Templated Objects – A simple, consistent system and UI for creating objects with variable parameters (ex: “A button where the text is variable”).

Nine-Slice Scaling – Support for using nine-slice scaling when importing bitmap objects (thus allowing the ability to scale different portions of the bitmap differently).

Improved Styling – An improved Style Editor with the ability to import/export as CSS.

I am trying to keep things focused. There are many, many cool features that could be added to or modified within Inkscape. But, in the interest of hitting some specific goals, I’m keeping my work focused on those three areas.

Over the next two weeks I will be working with members of the community (including a few of you that I already know will be looking to lend a hand) to spec out the details of what these will look like. [We’ll also be working with the Inkscape crew to make sure that we’re working on these in such a way that they feel it would be beneficial to Inkscape over-all… and that we aren’t stepping on anyone’s toes.]

For the moment, coordination of these efforts will be happening in an Inkscape sub-forum I have created here. If you have thoughts on the three feature areas above, feel free to post them there. As this moves forward we can improve the organization a bit.